95. JFK vs the CIA: Death in Dallas (Ep 6)

19:49David:And I mean, some of the ideas here of Mongoose, I mean, just to run through some of them, Operation Freeride, create unrest and dissension among the Cuban people by airdropping valid Pan Am or KLM one-way airline tickets, good for passage to Mexico City or Caracas. I mean, giving people free airline ticket, I mean, I guess, you know, saying you can get out of the country. I mean, quite expensive, but also I just don't see how that's going to work. I mean, Operation Good Times disillusioned the Cuban population with the Castro image by distribution of fake photographic material such as an obese Castro with two beauties in any situation desired.

20:31David:Ostensibly within a room in the Castro residence, lavishly furnished, and a table brimming over with the most delectable Cuban food. airdrop toilet paper into Cuba. That's one of my favorites. Airdrop toilet paper into Cuba with pictures on alternate sheets of Fidel and Khrushchev. I mean, it is slightly childish. It's slightly prank-like, but I guess if you're desperate, desperate times, call for desperate measures.

20:55Gordon:I mean, this one, which would have been real grim, Operation Northwoods, which was to create pretexts that would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba. And one idea here was having friendly Cubans in Cuban army uniforms attack Guantanamo Bay. There was another one about potentially carrying out a terror campaign in the Miami area that could be blamed on Castro. False flag. False flag, right? I mean, none of these plans are adopted. Yeah, we should say. None of them were adopted. But I think what they do signal is, number one, the immense amount of pressure that's coming down on Mongoose by Bobby Kennedy to just come up with results, to generate results.

21:36Gordon:And the fact that the kind of normal stuff that the CIA would do as part of a covert action program, working with exiles, building up a paramilitary group, propaganda, sabotage, they're not working, right? It's just not having the desired effect. Now, another character, and he is indeed a character who gets involved in the Cuba effort at this point, is at the CIA. He's a renowned case officer named William Harvey, who had been station chief in Berlin and had helped actually mastermind the Berlin Tunnel operation.

22:09David:Also had been one of the first to spot that Kim Philby might be a badden when Philby was in Washington. So he's kind of a very, very interesting character, but also kind of slightly erratic, slightly tricky. I think it's fair to say.

22:23Gordon:He's pear-shaped. So if you're picturing a sort of swashbuckling James Bond figure, Bill Harvey is not that. Although he does seem to have the Bond libido, Bill Harvey claims that he slept with a woman every day of his life since he'd been an adolescent. He also carried a gun at all times, which is not common for CIA officers. Now, what he starts to run at the CIA is something called Task Force W, which is going to be the kind of revamped Cuba effort at the agency. He stands up a group called ZR Rifle, which is going to undertake executive action against Castro. And so very interestingly, we have this contrast between JFK essentially not authorizing the airstrikes that might have enabled the Bay of Pigs invasion to succeed, doesn't want to get into overt conflict with Castro, but we're now sort of doubling down on actually killing him.

23:20Gordon:Gordon, we have not talked in a while about our mafia hitmen friends who had been dispatched to go after Castro, right? Now, Bill Harvey in kind of the spring-summer of 1961, he takes over that portfolio. And he's running, if you recall, our mafia friends were Handsome Johnny Rosselli, Sam Giancana of the Chicago Outfit, and they were being essentially run by a guy named Bob Mayhew, who was a former FBI agent who the CIA used for sort of odd and sometimes sleazy jobs.

23:55David:And I can imagine Harvey being just the right man for this because he's more like them than anyone else. I mean, he kind of looks and feels a bit Tony Soprano, Bill Harvey. So I think he's going to get on quite well with these gangsters, which is perhaps, again, going to lead to some of the conspiracy theories, which will come later on down the line.

24:12Gordon:One of the first things that Bill Harvey does is he looks at the interaction with the mobsters, And I mean, plotting had kind of been stalled since the first failed effort to deliver poison pills to an anti-Castro agent in Cuba. Now, Harvey looks at this and says, OK, I want Sam Giancana out of the picture. You remember Sam Giancana has a big mouth and also had convinced the agency to help him bug a hotel room to see if his girlfriend was cheating on him and gotten the CIA and some hot water with the FBI. So Bill Harvey says this guy's a liability. there's another mobster involved named Santo Traficante who is a drug runner but that's not the only reason he's fallen out of the agency's favor and it's because he's actually suspected of maybe sabotaging that earlier poison pill attempt or perhaps more worrisome that the agent to whom those pills were passed was in fact a double and working for Castro and so this whole network under Traficante is sort of suspect.

25:12Gordon:And what happens is that the mob effort is essentially whittled down to handsome Johnny Rosselli and they hatch another plan, Gordon. And do you know what it is? It is poison pills. It is the exact same plan as the one they hatched before. And the idea is that, again, the CIA will deliver poison pills that a band named Tony Verona, who's part of this exile group in Miami. Tony Verona will run those poison pills to a contact in Havana who works at one of Castro's favorite restaurants. And in exchange, Tony Verona's group wants guns and money. So Bill Harvey and the CIS Chieva Station in Miami fill a U-Haul trailer with$5 ,000 worth of explosives, detonators, 30 caliber rifles, 45 caliber handguns, radios.

26:00Gordon:They leave it all parked in the U-Haul at a drive-in restaurant in Miami. Verona's people pick it up and those pills will eventually find their way into Havana. Now, Roselli is pulled deeper into the work by Bill Harvey. And it seems that Roselli and Bill Harvey get along really well, actually. There's like a mutual respect between them. Essentially, Roselli, who is a member of the mafia, is tapped by Harvey to help organize Cuban exile kind of commando and gun running missions into Cuba, oftentimes outside the purview of the station in Miami. And this is a period where there are just wild stories of near miss assassination attempts against Fidel.

26:47Gordon:In one case, Rosselli prepares a team who had allegedly nearly assassinated Castro at a Havana intersection in September of 1961. That team's rolled up and captured and executed. In another case, a team is infiltrated into Cuba with the idea that they will fire rocket-propelled grenades at Castro when he appears during a public ceremony, but there's problems with the weapons and they're arrested. And then back to the poison pills. In another case in 1963, one of Verona's, Tony Verona's assets, who's a waiter in Havana at one of Castro's favorite haunts, the Hotel Havana Libre, is working when Fidel shows up and orders a chocolate shake.

27:29Gordon:Now, the asset apparently has one of the poison pills hidden in the freezer of the restaurant and kind of a back panel, but the pill had frozen to the metal siding. And when the waiter is trying to claw the pill off so he can put it into the shake, it bursts open and is totally useless. So again, we have just failed assassination attempt after failed assassination attempt. All the while, the CIA's effort against Cuba is getting huge. I mean, this is a period where the CIA station in Miami is probably one of the largest in the world. And there are so many boats ferrying agents and supplies into Cuba that the agency may have controlled the third largest navy in the Caribbean at that period of time.

28:17Gordon:But despite all of this activity, by October of 1962, Mongoose and the CIA's task force W under Bill Harvey have fallen well short of expectations. They're putting together a list of targets to hit inside Cuba. They're compiling a target list, but really not much has actually happened.

28:41David:And there, I think, is a perfect moment to take a break because in October 1962, something else is going to happen in Cuba, which is going to be very important when it comes to JFK's presidency. So let's take a break. And after that, we'll look at the last months, really, of JFK's presidency leading up to his death. See you after the break. Evening. Buyers remorse. Buy a new car? I'll be moving in. Let's get started.

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30:33David:Welcome back. We left things in October 1962. And of course, that is a big month in world history. What happens, Gordon? Something called the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, I should say, in case you're wondering how we're going to squeeze that into the last of a six-part series, we're going to do it in 15 minutes. Let's do it. 10 seconds summary. No, we're not going to do it in 10 seconds, because I think it's worth its own series, particularly because it intersects with some really interesting spy stories about Penkovsky and about imagery intelligence and things like that. But the crucial point is October 1962, US intelligence, U-2 spy planes detect the fact that the Soviet Union looks to be putting missiles onto the island of Cuba.

31:12David:And this is going to cause one of the great crises of the Cold War, isn't it? Because President Kennedy is going to have to decide what to do about it, how far to go to confront the Soviet Union about these missiles, the fear being, of course, that they are nuclear-tipped missiles, which are going to be close to the United States. And that is something which he's not willing to tolerate. And it's very a lot from Bay of Pigs. One of the things that I think he learns is not necessarily to listen to people like the CIA and the military. I think he feels that was my mistake that time round. Of course, when it comes to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the military particularly are saying, let's go to war.

31:52David:Let's invade Cuba. Let's go to war. Some of them are basically thinking, let's just get on with this whole World War III thing with the Soviet Union because we've got to do it. You can see him having grown from the experience of Bay of pigs in the way he handles the Cuban Missile Crisis. I think it's really interesting because he could have taken that opportunity to basically do what he wants to do, which is get rid of Castro, and there are definitely people wanting him to do that. But he's learned to be sceptical and back away from the most aggressive option and think quite carefully. So he learns, and it's emblematic of a person who suddenly put the right structures and right systems in place to handle a crisis.

32:33David:And it comes through very well. But of course, it does leave this issue of Cuba unresolved.

32:38Gordon:But it does have a very significant impact on how the Kennedy administration pursues its goal of eliminating Castro. Because those U-2 reconnaissance flights, they showed not just missiles, but actually a massive Soviet military buildup on the island. Aircraft, thousands of troops. Much later, historians will learn that the number was like 40 ,000 Soviet troops. So all of a sudden, the risk of military or covert action adventures in Cuba has gone way up from the perspective of the White House. So every command of mission, every act of sabotage could result in direct conflict with the Russians, in theory.

33:19Gordon:And on the 29th of October, so this is in the middle of the missile crisis, The RFK goes to Mongoose, goes to the CIA and basically says, shut down the Cuba operations. I don't want there to be any command omissions or infiltrations done anymore. And I think the Russian presence there and the kind of sense of a near miss in the missile crisis, what it does is I think it drives the Kennedys to actually kind of look even more closely at executive action or assassination targeting Castro. rather than this broader effort to kind of sabotage the island or to run exiles or commando raids in that might potentially hit the Russians.

34:03David:A more targeted option is better. But it also leads to a massive row with Bill Harvey, doesn't it? Which I think is very, very interesting because they're worried during the Cuban Missile Crisis of CIA covert action kind of triggering a war or undermining the policy. And Bill Harvey is basically kind of still going at it.

34:24Gordon:Well, Bill Harvey sends a team in during the missile crisis. Which is nuts. Which is nuts. And against orders. Harvey had approved an infiltration operation. During the Cuba missile crisis. And when RFK finds that out, I mean, he goes absolutely nuts. And it's also, I think, the case that there was kind of simmering personal beef between RFK and Harvey that had been building up. There's a story about how the year before, RFK had actually been stopped by Harvey when he was walking out of a room with a classified CIA cable. And Harvey tells him basically, give that back to me. So there's like a personal beef here.

35:03Gordon:I also think that Bill Harvey looked back at Bay of Pigs and said, the Kennedys were responsible for this. There's sort of an actual verbal altercation between Bill Harvey and RFK over the Bay of Pigs that leads McCone, who's the head of the CIA, basically to say, look, Harvey has destroyed himself today. His usefulness has ended. So Bill Harvey gets sent to Rome, although he does meet one more time with handsome Johnny Rosselli in January of 63. It's a little murky because he pays Rosselli to defray some of his expenses. And then a few weeks later, Harvey tells Handsome Johnny that, look, the operation against Castro is terminated, but this bounty, this$150 ,000 bounty is still in place.

35:51Gordon:So what seems to have happened in this kind of mafia stream is that throughout 1963, there's probably something like an open contract on Castro that the mob has put out there that's well-known inside the Cuban exile community in Miami. So even if the CIA isn't pulling the strings, there's kind of an outstanding mob reward if someone could pull it off.

36:13David:Yeah. And it's also worth just saying, you know, Bill Harvey, who has this massive falling out with the Kennedy White House, blames them for the Bay of Pigs. He clearly leaves with a grievance and a gun. And one of the kind of tracks of the theories around the conspiracy around the Kennedy assassination will involve Harvey, actually. The people who do believe that the CIA might have been responsible, people will point to Harvey as a man who had this kind of real bitterness towards the Kennedys and who felt they'd let the CIA down and who's been moved out of his job and has contacts with the mob.

36:46David:So you can see why he becomes part of the kind of folklore around what might have happened there.

36:51Gordon:A theory that we will be and are exploring in our exclusive mini-series for Declassified Club members about these theories surrounding the JFK assassination in Cuba and the mob. And the CIA. Don't forget the CIA. I always forget to mention the CIA there, Gordon, for some reason.

37:08David:But meanwhile, back in the run-up to the assassination, I guess Harvey is out. He's going to be replaced by someone else, Desmond Fitzgerald. I guess partly because he's more of a RFK man.

37:19Gordon:Yeah, I mean, RFK is basically making personnel decisions four or five rungs down the ladder at the CIA. So Desmond Fitzgerald takes over the Cuba effort at CIA. He's a Harvard man like the Kennedys, been a lawyer in New York before the Second World War. He's part of this elite kind of Georgetown set of journalists and politicians and CIA men in Washington. Des Fitzgerald sees RFK socially on the weekends, kind of like Bacone. Like all good Cuba guys at the CIA, he has his own sort of dabbling with lunatic ideas of how you get rid of Castro. Fitzgerald is the one who apparently came up with the, I think now infamous idea, to develop an exploding seashell that would be so attractive that Castro, who was an avid diver, would be sorely tempted to pick it up while he's underwater.

38:07David:This is one of the most stupid ideas. It's no wonder it becomes legendary. How do you know who's going to pick up that particular attractive seashell? That's the problem, Gordon. Or that some other random diver is going to pick it up and blow themselves up. I mean, that's kind of nuts, isn't it? And what, it's going to be placed by a midget submarine, is that right? I mean, anyway, I think nuts. That's one of the other problems.

38:29Gordon:You have to, a midget submarine has to get very close to the Cuban shore to deposit the seashell, and you have no idea who else is going to pick it up. Also, how do you design a seashell that's just unbelievably attractive such that Fidel could not help but pick it up? Anyway, lots of problems. That idea is abandoned.

38:45David:So more ideas on assassination and more ideas on sabotage as well, I guess, to try and kind of keep the momentum going. That's right.

38:52Gordon:In the spring of 63, the CIA is kind of getting, I think, fed up with these commando raids that the exiles are running. It's kind of seen as a way to pump up the exiles, but it's having really no impact inside Cuba. And it, again, runs the risk of direct conflict with the Russians. So in April of 1963, JFK asks for the CIA to go back and come up with an updated sabotage plan. So we get some sense here of like, it's the definition of crazy. You just kind of keep doing the same things over and over again, you know, expecting different results and getting the same one. The Kennedys go back, let's try sabotage.

39:28Gordon:So Des Fitzgerald works up a plan over the summer. In June, he presents his proposal to JFK, the sabotage plan would be targeted at four different segments of the Cuban economy, electric power, oil refineries, railroads and highways, manufacturing. The program was designed to kind of interlock with efforts by the exiles to keep conducting these raids. And interestingly, though, Gordon, there's a question at this meeting about whether the Cubans might retaliate in kind. And this seems to be maybe the first or one of the first times that the possibility of any Cuban retaliation appears in notes of discussions at the National Security Council level, which again, when you're talking about different theories around the assassination, I mean, this is the middle of 1963.

40:13Gordon:We're months away from John F. Kennedy's assassination. Where's that coming from? The Cubans started to think about how do we make the Americans pay a price for everything they're doing on the island.

40:23David:Yeah. And they've tried to do some things, haven't they, the Cubans? I mean, in 1962, I think Castro dispatches some agents to New York to carry out some bombings targeting the Statue of Liberty and Grand Central Station. They get caught by the FBI, but it does show that Castro wants to do something, which again feeds into one of the theories around JFK. He knows that they're trying to kill him. There's no doubt about that. So it's not implausible to think he might want to return the favor.

40:51Gordon:One of the other threads here in the last months of JFK's life is that Des Fitzgerald and the CIA are looking for an asset close to Castro who might be willing to help kill him and then to maybe instigate a coup, right? So there is an effort in the fall or the autumn, as you would be fond of saying, Gordon, to kind of look at the Cuban military, the upper echelons of the Cuban military, and evaluate each of those personalities for suitability as a recruitment target. And the agency looks through maybe 150 potential recruits. It's in contact with a very small number of them, maybe three or four.

41:29Gordon:And one of those is a Cuban major named Rolando Cubela Sequeires, who will get the cryptonym AM Lash. AM is the digraph for Cuba, for Cuban assets back in those days. Now, Cubela, he's a prominent Cuban who had been a communist. He'd actually been a player in the revolution. He was responsible for killing the deposed dictator Batista's director of military intelligence. But Cubela has had a falling out with Castro, and he has met with CIA handlers off and on and always outside of Cuba since 1961. He's considered defecting. He's gone back into Cuba for periods of time and been incommunicado. He's refused a polygraph.

42:13Gordon:He's really hotheaded and very mercurial. So he's not a great asset from the standpoint of having any kind of control over him. What the CIA tried to set him up with from a commo standpoint was the idea that he would have a one-way listen radio receiver, right? And the idea with that is that the agency would send messages into Cuba on the radio, but he would not respond back, which would make it much harder to track the frequencies. He would respond back using secret writing. That combo plan had not actually worked when he was inside Cuba, so he had gone dark. But by September of 63, the CIA has reestablished contact with Cubella, and he seems to be warming up to the idea of helping to instigate a coup, but again, in a sign of just how rough of an asset this guy was to handle.

43:04Gordon:in order to do that, he wants to meet with Bobby Kennedy, which of course is a no-go. So instead, Desmond Fitzgerald flies to Paris to meet him. And of course, the whole idea here is maybe this guy would run a military coup for us, right? And we can handle Castro that way. What Kubela wants is an indication of some kind of policy support from the Kennedys. He wants weapons, he wants explosives, and he wants a means of protecting himself in a confrontation with Castro or his security forces. Now, there has been endless speculation about whether Kubela was real or whether he was a dangle from Castro in this period.

43:45Gordon:And of course, it's fed these conspiracy theories that Castro knew in the days and weeks running up to JFK's assassination, the CIA was actually trying to instigate a military coup against him. So there's arguments and theories on both sides. But what is clear is that the agency ends up authorizing a bundle of kind of weapons for Cubella that'll be hidden at a cache inside Cuba. And while Des Fitzgerald says, look, we don't want to kill Castro, it's clear that the agency also seems to be arming Cubella with weapons that he could use in just such a case. And what ends up being delivered to him and worked on by the technical services division inside CIA is that Fitzgerald gives to Cubella a poison injecting pen.

44:37Gordon:It's a paper-made pen filled with a poisoned hypodermic syringe. And Cubella has to fill it with Blackleaf 40, which is this kind of lethal mix of nicotine and pesticide. The CIA report later said that the pen's needle is so fine that the victim would hardly feel it when it was inserted. The pen, Gordon, which the CIA hopes will finally put an end to Fidel Castro, is delivered to Covella on, when else? November the 22nd of 1963.

45:06David:A fateful day. I guess that pen has echoes, doesn't it, of the ricin umbrella tip used against Markov in London many years later, you know, as a kind of a device where someone will barely notice that they've been poisoned. But yes, so the pen is delivered to Cabela on that day. And that is, of course, what will be the final day of JFK's presidency, November the 22nd, 1963.

45:30Gordon:That's right. It's a bright, sunny and windy day in Dallas, Texas.

45:35David:Where you are now.

45:36Gordon:10 minutes from where I'm recording this. JFK is at the tail end of a four-day tour of Texas. He's been to San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth. He's now in Dallas. After Dallas, he's planning to go on to Austin and then spend the weekend at his vice president LBJ's East Texas Ranch. JFK wakes up that morning in Fort Worth. There's a small rally that he attends across the street from his hotel. He goes to a breakfast. And when he returns to his hotel room, his wife, Jackie, shows him a full page ad in the paper that is highly critical of him. And he makes this famous comment that they're in nut country, which I love that the city that I now live in is referred to as nut country.

46:15Gordon:And he says that someone could have assassinated him with a pistol the previous evening. So at 1230 PM, JFK on that bright sunny day is riding in an open top motorcade accompanied by Jackie, the governor of Texas and the governor's wife. And they're driving through downtown Dallas. He's headed to a luncheon at the Dallas trademark. The motorcade passes through Dealey Plaza. At that time, it's a grassy square surrounded by fountains and concrete pergolas. And there are three shots, although some will say as many as six, but three shots are fired. The first one is a miss. The second one, about three and a half seconds later, tears through JFK's upper back between his neck and right shoulder and exits through his neck, hits Governor Connolly.

47:00Gordon:The third, five seconds later, is a straight-on shot through the brain. He is rushed to Parkland Hospital and declared dead by 1 p.m. Later that That day, of course, Lee Harvey Oswald is arrested on suspicion of being the lone gunman who murdered John F. Kennedy. And Gordon, case closed, right? And just three shots, no magic bullet, no grassy knoll. Well, that's the thing is it's part of the resonance of this entire story today is coming out of the fact that case is absolutely not closed. In the minds of most Americans, case not closed.

47:37David:We'll get into this obviously much more in the miniseries, some of the theories around it. I think what's so important is if you see that moment of the assassination in the context of what has come before, you can start to see where the theories come from. Because you can start to see the kind of anger from Cuban exiles. You can see the anger from some parts of the CIA. You can see the anger and the relationship between the CIA and the mob. And you start to see this web which can be woven into an idea that it wasn't a low government. And of course, Lee Harvey Oswald as well is such an extraordinary character.

48:15David:I mean, this is someone who has defected to the Soviet Union, who approaches Soviet embassies after redefecting back to the United States in Mexico City, who's involved in Cuba campaigning in New Orleans. So the kind of overlap between the Cold War, between the Soviet Union, but also between The Cuban issue specifically is all there in the gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. So with this kind of context, it's not hard to understand why there will be so much focus on the question of whether it really was a lone gunman or not. And finally, the big investigation, the Warren Commission, who's going to be appointed to the Warren Commission?

48:53Gordon:Oh, I knew you were going to bring this up.

48:54David:Alan Dulles. everyone's favourite shadowy spymaster gets appointed to the commission, which kind of very much wants to say it's a lone gunman. Now, I'm not saying it's not a lone gunman, you know, we'll come to that later. But there's a kind of pressure to not open up the can of worms about all these other things. And all these other secrets, you know, about what the CIA has been up to, about Cuba, about the mob, about assassination plots, which will feed into that. And it's that secrecy, which is still only now, with more releases in the recent months being unwrapped.

49:27Gordon:But I think you can also draw a pretty straight line that begins in this period and includes Bay of Pigs, the zany and oftentimes illegal plotting by the CIA against Castro, and the Warren Commission. And you look at those three things, and I think the Warren Commission, as we'll talk about in the miniseries, kind of riddled with politics and problems and, you know, conspiracies of its own. You can look at those three things and kind of draw a line to say, this is a period where prior to this in the 50s, the 40s, there was a knee jerk trust of institutions and government by most Americans. And after, you no longer have that.

50:16Gordon:And you just have to look at the way the CIA is viewed today through the lens of a lot of these kind of activities or the way the Warren Commission is viewed today. I mean, the official record on the assassination is not trusted by the majority of Americans. And at one point in the late 90s was not trusted by 80 % of Americans. So this distrust of institutions, this distrust of the political narrative, this distrust of the Central Intelligence Agency. I think we've talked a lot in other episodes of this podcast about the role of the kind of Church Pike proceedings in the 70s as being this turning point.

50:56Gordon:But you could make the argument that the seeds of that distrust start in this period under Kennedy and go back to Cuba.

51:05David:I think that is absolutely right. I think there's a sense in which innocence is lost for America, in which a kind of cynicism and conspiracism takes root because of the kind of psychic shock of having this hugely popular, young, vibrant, virile president murdered in this dramatic way, people are going to want to look for answers. And we know people will often want to look for reasons behind it. And then, of course, because of this history with the CIA and because of the fact that Harvey Oswald has this kind of curious background, there's going to be layers of secrecy which are placed over the story of the assassination and over Lee Harvey Oswald.

51:43David:We had document releases just in the last few months, which may have not told us a different answer as to who killed Kennedy, but which certainly reveal, for instance, what the CIA was up to in Latin America in a different way, or what they knew about Lee Harvey Oswald, what they were doing in Mexico City. Of course, all these secrets had been kept because the CIA felt they needed to keep them. But because people knew there were secrets there, that's also fueled the kind of conspiracism which has come out of it. And so we'll have more time, I guess, to explore who we really think did kill Kennedy.

52:15David:But I think this series does give you a feel of why, at least, a theory that it wasn't a lone government has taken root and just the kind of crazy nature of those times, I think.

52:26Gordon:And why, and again, we'll discuss this much more in our mini-series for club members, which I would encourage everyone who is listening to this, if they have not already, to go to therestisclassified.com, become a club member, and listen to that miniseries. Because in the wake of the assassination, Bobby Kennedy asks McCone if the CIA did it. Bobby Kennedy wonders if it could have been the Cubans. So again, he's obviously grief-stricken. But at the time, given this history we just talked about, These are not zany ideas. These are hypotheses or suggestions that are held by senior officials in the United States government, right?

53:09Gordon:But I do think also the connection between Cuba, Bay of Pigs, Kennedy, the agency, and the deepening involvement of the United States and Vietnam is also an enduring legacy of this time period where when JFK takes office, there are maybe a few hundred American advisors in Vietnam. And by the time he's shot on November 22nd, 1963, there's over 15 ,000. So it obviously becomes LBJ's war. But so much of the pivot in many ways to Vietnam and the focus on Vietnam is a legacy, I think, of the very personal failure that JFK felt at the Bay of Pigs and a desire that you wouldn't have governments in other parts of the world lost to communism on his watch.

54:01David:I mean, just to wrap it up, I think that is why this is such a consequential story. Because, you know, it tells you something about the CIA, tells you something about the CIA and JFK, tells you something about America and the American psyche, and it tells you something about international history and Cold War history, whether it's the Cuban Missile Crisis or the buildup in Vietnam. So many of those things kind of relate back, almost so many of them to the kind of Bay of Pigs and to the failure that takes place there. I think it's a kind of remarkably pivotal and important and kind of consequential event.

54:32David:So it's been a kind of absolutely fascinating series. I think it has opened up my eyes to just how important that event was and the consequences of it. So just a reminder, if you want to hear more, we will be talking about the assassination and how the CIA might have done it. But David's scoffing, laughing. and the Cubans and the mob.

54:53Gordon:We're going to look at all the alternatives that connect into this story.

54:56David:With the mooch amongst others. Yeah. Yeah. So do join up if you want to hear that. But otherwise, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.

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55:41David:This is an urgent appeal from the Disasters Emergency Committee. Two devastating earthquakes have hit Venezuela, resulting in widespread destruction. Thousands have been killed and injured, and survivors desperately need food, water, shelter and medical care. Go to dec.org.uk to donate or text DEC to 70150 to give£10. Texts cost your donation plus standard network rate. See website for Ts and Cs. Thank you.